Aquanode DocsQuickstart
Launch your first setup, connect to it, save a version, and pause it.
This walks the whole loop in the console: launch a setup, get onto the box, save what
you built, and stop paying for it. Prefer the terminal? Do the same thing with the
aq CLI quickstart.
Create an account
Sign up and verify your email. You will need credit on the account before you can rent a machine, which you can add from Billing. Cards and Solana both work.
Launch a setup
Go to Setups and click New setup.
- Pick a starting point. An empty box gives you a GPU and a shell with nothing preinstalled. Notebook gives you JupyterLab and PyTorch. Image generation and Video generation give you ComfyUI on a card sized for the job.
- Name it. The name is not an id, so you can change it later.
- Under Run it on, leave Pick for me selected. Any free card will do, so Aquanode takes the cheapest one that fits.
- Optionally tick Pause it when it goes idle so the setup stops charging on its own if you walk away.
- Click Create and launch.
The right-hand panel prices the launch before anything is rented: the machine, its VRAM, the provider, the hourly rate, and a running-all-day estimate. Nothing is started and nothing is charged until a box actually comes up.
You do not create a setup separately
The setup exists from this first launch. There is no second step to turn the box into something reusable.
Get onto the box
Once the setup is running, open it and use Open deployment to reach the machine. From there you get the HTTPS URL and credentials for whatever app your starting point installed, plus a browser terminal on providers that support one.
From your own terminal:
aq ssh <name>That manages the keypair and writes a ~/.ssh/config alias, so plain ssh <alias>
works afterwards.
Do some work, then save it
Put your work under /workspace. That is the mount path that travels with the setup.
Anything outside it lives on the rented machine and goes away with it.
When you have something worth keeping, click Save a version, or run:
aq save <name>Each save is numbered: v1, v2, v3. Resuming one brings that exact state back on a new machine.
Stop paying for it
Pause the setup. That saves a version and releases the machine, so the hourly charge stops:
aq pause <name>Bring it back later on whatever card is free:
aq deploy --snapshot <id>A paused setup rents no machine. You pay only to hold what it saved, at $0.02/GiB per month.
If you are finished with the machine entirely, close it from the machine page with
Close deployment, or run aq down <name>.